Royal Blood Interview: Mike And Ben Talk Their Debut Album’s “Luminous Cocktail”

For their debut album, Royal Blood had teamed up with up-and-coming producer Tom Dalgety, forming a creative partnership that would prove crucial to their early sound. “We experienced Tom Dalgety and Rockfield in the same dosage as session musicians for another artist,” Kerr says. “They came as a package – and still do, honestly. It’s a luminous cocktail we’ll never grow tired of sticking our straws into.” During breaks, Kerr and Thatcher took the occasional gallop through the South Wales countryside. “My favourite memory was riding horses at Rockfield in between takes,” Kerr recalls.

With recording sessions stretching into 2014, the band released their mammoth-sized second single, Little Monster, that February. Built on hulking hooks and a meaty drum groove, it proved that Royal Blood were trading in nothing less than colossal rockers. Snarling and swaggering throughout its three and a half minutes, the track climbed to No.74 in the UK, successfully building on the momentum of the group’s debut single by being crowned Hottest Record on Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio 1 show.

As a teaser for their upcoming full-length, the four-track Out Of The Black EP quickly followed, before making way for Royal Blood’s third single, Come On Over, which found Kerr reflecting upon his religious upbringing over sinewy bass riffs. Offering up a personal narrative about Kerr’s experience of leaving the church he had been brought up in, the song showcased Royal Blood’s defiantly robust breed of brazen blues-rock, with Kerr wearing his atheism like a badge of pride (“There’s no god and I don’t really care, I don’t really care”).

That same month, Royal Blood announced their arrival in the mainstream by performing on BBC TV’s high-profile Later With… Jools Holland. Proving that they could take to the stage with all the raucous energy of a full rock band, the duo’s performance generated much buzz and raised expectations for their forthcoming debut album.

The release: “No one really knows the recipe to these things”

Three months later, Royal Blood scored their biggest hit to date with their fourth single, Figure It Out, a powerhouse rocker that saw the group make their mark in the US when it rose to No.18 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart. Also strongly embraced in the group’s homeland, Figure It Out became DJ Annie Mac’s Hottest Record In The World during her BBC Radio 1 Future Sounds show.

Full of muscular riffs riding a thumping rhythm, Figure It Out rumbled through the speakers with hard-rock gusto and featured a killer drum breakdown from Ben Thatcher that instantly became iconic. “No one really knows the recipe to these things, unfortunately,” Thatcher tells Dig! about his jaw-dropping percussive break, “but that adds to the mystique and unpredictability of making music. It just felt right in our muscles when we played it.” Breaking a three-month silence that had followed their busy start to the year, the song left Royal Blood poised to release their debut album.

Issued mere weeks later, on 25 August 2014, Royal Blood rocketed straight to No.1 in the UK, selling more than 66,000 copies in its first week. This impressive feat made it the fastest-selling rock debut album in three years, paving the way for Royal Blood to become rock’s next big thing. Unsurprisingly, it was all killer, no filler: the wiry, punky thrash of You Can Be So Cruel recalled Queens Of The Stone Age’s “robot rock”, with hi-hat vibrations that could leave C-3PO undone on the floor, while Blood Hands pulsed like a fist around an aortic valve as it built to a blood-boiling climax.

Elsewhere, Loose Change was as audacious as a bank heist, locking into a grinding bass hook as part of a smash-and-grab job on the listener’s senses. Then there was Careless, a tremendous force of nature that flooded the ear canals like an unstoppable tsunami. Even the album’s closing track, Better Strangers, refused to let up, with Thatcher’s burly drum beat matching brawny bass work from Kerr that oozes as much testosterone as a heavyweight punch-up.

“It’s sure as hell effective,” Drowned In Sound’s Christian Cottingham wrote of the album, “a tight bind of rhythm and noise, of chugging menace and sudden spikes.” Elsewhere, Kerrang! magazine welcomed Kerr and Thatcher into the sanctum of discerning of metalheads, declaring, “If the duo’s choruses set the gold standard, it’s the riffs that are worth their weight in platinum.”

Capping off a remarkable year, in December 2014 Royal Blood released Ten Tonne Skeleton as the album’s final single, making for a thunderous exclamation point to an astonishing run. A bone-rattling assault of squalling syncopated riffs and pummelling drums, it epitomised Kerr and Thatcher’s ability to create a wall of sound that belied their two-piece setup.

The legacy: “It’s meaningful to our fans around the world”

With their debut album, Royal Blood not only lived up to their early hype, they exceeded expectations. Even Foo Fighters’ frontman, Dave Grohl, was impressed. “Not that I think that rock’n’roll is the only type of music, but in this day and age it’s good to see it fucking show it’s face now and then,” he told NME, adding of Royal Blood: “And it’s a good record, I’m excited about that.”

A modern rock phenomenon, Royal Blood went on to sell more than 300,000 copies, earning its creators the Best British Group award at the BRITs in early 2015. With the band’s UK shows selling out in minutes, a growing US fanbase would demand their own taste of Royal Blood – granted when Dave Grohl invited the group to support Foo Fighters on tour later that year.

The album’s extraordinary success on vinyl is also a worthy part of its legacy, largely due to its striking cover. The artwork, created by Dan Hillier, was based on a piece called Pachamama – the Quechuan word for Mother Earth – and features a female figure wrapped in a shawl covered in trees and foliage, her head blooming into cosmic constellations. Hillier’s work won the prestigious Best Art Vinyl award in 2014, adding yet another accolade to Royal Blood’s growing list of achievements.

Reflecting on their debut album’s impact a decade later, both Kerr and Thatcher profess to being surprised and delighted by how it not only catapulted them to fame but also brought hard-rock roaring back to life. “We never dreamed of anyone outside of Worthing, West Sussex, hearing our recordings,” Kerr tells Dig! “The fact that it’s meaningful to our fans round the world, that never ceases to bamboozle us.”

The perfect launchpad for the group, Royal Blood’s self-titled debut album set the blueprint for the band’s subsequent evolution – one that carries on to this day. Their gritty, no-frills approach now resonates with listeners far beyond Worthing, tapping into a hunger for rock music in an era increasingly dominated by radio-friendly EDM and focus-grouped pop confections.

By rejecting popular wisdom surrounding what a rock band should be, and reimagining what a duo could achieve with only amps and effects pedals at their disposal, the massive, all-encompassing sound Royal Blood achieved remains nothing short of mind-blowing. There are probably still many who would be fooled into thinking they were listening to a four-piece rock band when they listen to Kerr and Thatcher’s music. They would be wrong. If Royal Blood’s debut album proves anything, it’s that the most impactful revolutions can come from the raw and primal chemistry of two musicians with a shared vision and an unquenchable desire to rock.

Buy ‘Royal Blood’ 10th-anniversary vinyl and merch.